I Feel Pretty

Aight let’s get something out of the way. Going into this movie I expected it to be bad, and that’s not an entirely fair thing to think going into any movie. I don’t think it’s a huge deal but I do think it’s important for me to take note of biases like that before talking about a movie. That being said let’s move forward.

You can watch a brief version of my thoughts or read a little more in-depth down below.

I Feel Pretty is a new comedy movie starring Amy Schumer, the movie follows the story of Renee Bennett, a girl who just doesn’t feel like she’s pretty enough. One day through the magic of a head injury Renee believes that she’s become unequivocally beautiful and to her the image in the mirror confirms it. Surging with confidence now Renee begins to make all her dreams come true but yadda yadda yadda we’re all painfully aware of where this story is going. It’s a very simplistic Rags to Riches story, and that’s fine so long as the movie is funny though right?

I guess that leads directly to my big question for this movie, “Can I Feel Pretty maintain it’s laughs or does it get bogged down with other things?”

The answer is… it can… sorta…kinda? Let’s look at it this way, there are a lot of genuinely good laughs to be had in this movie, unfortunately those laughs mostly come from the basic premise of, “boy oh boy isn’t that Amy Schumer awkward and lovable sometimes?” and it’s just not enough to carry a whole movie. That’s not to bash on Schumer at all, I actually think her performance was pretty solid and heartfelt, it’s more of a problem in the writing department because they don’t seem to know how to really utilize the rest of the characters in the movie. That basic premise of Schumer’s awkwardness = hilarity also gets fairly stale as the movie progresses which leaves most of the final act’s jokes feeling very flat.

Ok before I go on I just have to bring something up. There are these two time-lapses of the New York cityscape (I’m pretty sure that’s a word) that are just randomly inserted into the movie and serve no actual purpose. They don’t advance the story, they don’t show character development, they don’t even set up a joke. They literally just tell the audience, “Hey it’s the next day now” and that could’ve been done by just cutting to the next scene so yeah, no real reason to have those in there other than someone thought, “Those time-lapses that Casey Neistat does in his videos are really cool looking, we should do it on our movie!” That’s just a nitpick from me, but I need to make it really clear that it bothered me a lot. Ok back to the movie.

Remember when I was talking about the final act of this movie? Let’s go back there for a minute. I’m pretty used to comedy movies having pretty lackluster finales because they stop the jokes to hit on whatever the message they were trying to deliver and most of the time it feels a bit forced, but I Feel Pretty’s finale is like really really forced. Sort of like the movie decided, “Ya know we all know where this is going let’s just cut some corners and get to the good stuff ok?” It’s not ok movie, cutting those corners took me completely out of the movie and made it impossible to really get behind the bigger emotional moments.

The last thing before I wrap up, let’s talk character motivation. For about 90% of this movie Renee’s big desire is to be beautiful, so she exercises, wears trendy, and is on top of her makeup game. She eats like absolute garbage though. This doesn’t make any sense. Surely someone, as obsessed with her physical image, would be aware that all the exercise in the world can’t make up for eating junk constantly. It just strikes me as this huge gap in the logic of the movie that I noticed early on and continued to bother me throughout.

Aight so let’s wrap this thing up, despite the significant amount of bashing I just did there I did enjoy this movie, just barely. It’s the kind of movie that if my theoretical girlfriend dragged me to I wouldn’t be upset that I had seen it, but I would walk out of the theatre and never think about it again. Unless I made a review for it then I’d remember it for a few hours more and then forget about it forever. I Feel Pretty is just one of those movies that 2 years from now no one except diehard Amy Schumer fans will remember. For me that’s like a C+, see ya later I’m out.